Heckman Makes Media Rounds on Early Education

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has long championed investments in high-quality early education. Now, with President Obama proposing universal access to preschool, starting with children from low- and moderate-income families, Heckman has been busy explaining the benefits of high-quality early education in a number of media outlets.

Here is a sample of what Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has been saying:

“Quality really matters. That’s been pretty well documented…. In terms of the return on investment, per dollar return, the annual return for what you’d get on a bond or some kind of fixed income, you would have a rate that was 6-10 percent per year, which is extremely high. So even though it costs something, it’s about the return is to society and to the individuals…. I’m an economist. I would talk about both the benefits and the costs. And if the benefits really outweigh the costs, I think that’s something very rare. So it’s a good investment.”

“The results have been found from randomized trials where children are followed into age 40, and now plans will follow to age 50. We have very comprehensive measures of their crime. We have comprehensive measures of their earnings and so forth. So I would defend very strongly these high rates of return because they actually have been carefully evaluated. They include the cost of taxation. They include all of the cost of the public of actually taxing and using tax dollars.”

“There is a core set of values, a core set of capabilities that transcend the religious, the social and ethnic differences. In other words, I would argue every parent would want their child to actually have the capacities to succeed, to be able to acquire knowledge and to function on their own, to have autonomy, to have what some would call agency in the sense of being able to be self-propelling and self-controlled, being able to essentially shape their own life in their own terms. And it’s that universal core that has to be focused on and nested in a cultural context.”

Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.

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Alyssa Haywoode comes to Eye on Early Education after a career in journalism that included writing editorials for the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe. She has written about education, human services, immigration, homelessness, philanthropy and the arts.